Two sisters…freed by verbs.

Exactly this…

I attended a summit on human trafficking on February 9th — if you want a topic that will FREEZE your blood, human and labor trafficking will certainly do the trick.

One of our sessions discussed social media and the plight (and danger) that is the internet. This landed throughout the entire audience of professionals, parents, and clergy, all with dedication to want to prevent people (particularly children and adolescents) from getting entrapped by very elaborate schemes to groom and ultimately abduct them.

Facebook in particular seems to be the perfect hunting ground for predators. The information I learned blew my mind and made me reconsider all the more my relationship with social media. I have felt desperate to disconnect from pretty much everything besides LinkedIn. But I’m a semi-Millennial living in a modern world and I know that if I totally phase out, there is a huge number of people I love and care about who will slip into the void.

Plus, I’ll be honest, I get a lot of my news from my various Feeds. I hate frequenting CNN.com (it stresses me out and the app drives me bonkers) so how else will I know what’s going on if NPR doesn’t feel like reporting it?

Lo, I came across this article today that perfectly resonated. How to FREEZE your social media use without becoming a total hermit.

Essentially, author Green encourages us to use RSS feeds (Sis and I use Feedly so — check) and Newsletters (again, lots of self-improvement zines come to my inbox so — check). Green suggests subscribing to Vox Sentences, TWP Daily 202, No Complaints, and The Ann Friedman Weekly, which did motivate me to do some additional sleuthing this weekend for more news-centric subscriptions. Of course there are old-fashioned newspapers, which made me realize that I somehow am missing NPR’s app on my phone. Substituting one technology for another feels a little like cheating but for reals, the less I scroll through Facebook these days, the better I feel.

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the vow venture

51 verbs in 52 weeks; this was our venture in 2017.

In 2018, we have opted for 12 verbs in 12 months.

We have also, once again, chosen a single verb for the entirety of the year, our #OneWord; Our goal is to spend the year reflecting and putting this verb into practice. In 2017, for Lin, it was EMBRACE; for Steph, it was BUILD.

In 2018, for Lin, it is EXPAND; for Stephanie, it is NARROW.

Completely unplanned, we chose antonyms (opposites) of each other for our words this year, so we decided to keep that theme in mind for the 12 verbs we would encounter in 2018. We randomly selected six verbs and then chose antonyms for them. For example, in January 2018, we will CHARGE; in February, we will FREEZE.

The purpose of the VOW Venture is simple and remains unchanged: to live more intentionally aided by our favorite part of speech.